Affiliations: College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: This paper sets forth an integrated way of introducing bibliometrics to
relatively non-quantitative audiences, such as librarians and iSchool
students. The integrative device is the bibliogram, a linguistic object consisting of
a seed term and the terms that co-occur with it, ranked by their
co-occurrence counts with the seed - a standard ``core and scatter''
distribution. While the counts and the measures derived from them are indeed
central to bibliometrics, the associated terms are also important, and they
exhibit distinctive features that lead to psycholinguistic insights into
their distributions. This verbal side of bibliometrics is seldom highlighted
when the field is introduced, yet it may be of particular interest to
persons with backgrounds in the humanities. A list of words that students
associate with the word ``information'' is presented as a reference point
from psycholinguistics. Then term associations in bibliograms are
illustrated with the journals that cite an author, the books assigned to a
Library of Congress class, the journals that yield varying numbers of
articles to three literatures defined by seed terms, the bylines that an
author cites in a reading list, and the authors that are co-cited with Plato
in a map of the Plato literature.
Keywords: Teachers, students, iSchools, term distributions, count distributions, ease of association
